Subjectivity and Social Change in Higher Education


Book Description

Informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the assemblage and the wound-event, this book examines the complexity of educator subjectivity and social change within the higher education context in South Africa. The authors use arts-based methods to explore educators' experiences of personal and professional challenges in a rapidly changing context. The method is informed by critical, narrative and arts-based research traditions that extend into post-qualitative, autobiographical, performative and collaborative methods of inquiry. The book plays with the conflation of theory and methodology, to think about educator subjectivity as fluid and responsive to changing contexts. By understanding educator subjectivity as multiple and emergent rather than centered and fixed, the authors open new research avenues to explore themes of transformation, decolonisation and social change.




Making Modern Lives


Book Description

Making Modern Lives looks at how young people shape their lives as they move through their secondary school years and into the world beyond. It explores how they develop dispositions, attitudes, identities, and orientations in modern society. Based on an eight-year study consisting of more than 350 in-depth interviews with young Australians from diverse backgrounds, the book reveals the effects of schooling and of local school cultures on young people's choices, future plans, political values, friendships, and attitudes toward school, work, and sense of self. Making Modern Lives uncovers who young people are today, what type of identities and inequalities are being formed and reformed, and what processes and politics are at work in relation to gender, class, race, and the framing of vocational futures.




The Social Production of Knowledge in a Neoliberal Age


Book Description

Higher education exposes a key paradox of neoliberalism. The project of neoliberalism was said to be that of rolling back the state to liberate individuals, by replacing government bureaucracy with the free market. Rather than have the market serve individuals however, individuals were to serve the market. The marketisation ‘reforms’ in higher education, which sought to reshape knowledge production, with students investing in human capital and academics producing ‘transferable’ research, to make higher education of use to the economy, has resulted in extensive government bureaucracy and oppressive managerialist bureaucracy which is inefficient and expensive. Neoliberalism has always had authoritarian aspects and these are now coming to bear on universities. The state does not want critical and informed graduate citizens, but a hollowed out public sphere defined by consumption, willing servitude to the market and deference to state power. Attempts to reshape universities with bureaucracy are now accompanied by a culture war, attacking the production of critical knowledge. The authors in this book explore these issues and the possibilities for resistance and progressive change.




The Routledge International Handbook of Transdisciplinary Feminist Research and Methodological Praxis


Book Description

The Routledge International Handbook of Transdisciplinary Feminist Research and Methodological Praxis is organized around ways of doing fair and just research, with deliberate transdisciplinary overlap in each of the sections so as to share and demonstrate potential opportunities for lasting alliances. Authors and artists address topics that include the doing of original transdisciplinary research and engaging multiple communities in research; mentoring from both academic and community-based perspectives; creating and maintaining collaborative relationships; managing personal, professional, and financial challenges; addressing writing blocks and feelings of being overwhelmed; and experiences of care and joy. The range of feminist work invoked in this volume include, but are not limited to: intersectional feminisms, abolitionist feminism, Black feminism, Womanism, Chicana feminism, Latina feminism, BIPOC feminisms, Indigenous feminism, decolonial and postcolonial feminism, transnational feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer feminism, trans feminisms, poststructural feminism, posthuman and more-than-human feminism, materialist feminism, crip feminism, feminist disability studies, quantum feminism, sonic feminisms, feminist science studies, science and technology studies, or STS, and more. From advanced graduate students to seasoned scholars, this volume presents timely knowledge and will be useful as a substantive guide to round out understandings of multiple approaches to feminist research.




Subjectivity and Social Change in Higher Education


Book Description

Informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the assemblage and the wound-event, this book examines the complexity of educator subjectivity and social change within the higher education context in South Africa. The authors use arts-based methods to explore educators' experiences of personal and professional challenges in a rapidly changing context. The method is informed by critical, narrative and arts-based research traditions that extend into post-qualitative, autobiographical, performative and collaborative methods of inquiry. The book plays with the conflation of theory and methodology, to think about educator subjectivity as fluid and responsive to changing contexts. By understanding educator subjectivity as multiple and emergent rather than centered and fixed, the authors open new research avenues to explore themes of transformation, decolonisation and social change.




Collaboration in Higher Education


Book Description

Collaboration in Higher Education, an open access book, focuses on the opportunities and challenges created by engaging in collaboration and partnership in higher education. As higher education institutions become ever more competitive to sustain their place in a global, neoliberal education market, students and staff are confronted with alienating practices. Such practices create an individualistic, audit and surveillance culture that is exacerbated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the wholesale 'pivot' to online teaching. In this atomised and competitive climate, this volume synthesises theoretical perspectives and current practice to present case study examples that advocate for a more inclusive, cooperative, collaborative, compassionate and empowering education, one that sees learning and teaching as a practice that enables personal, collective and societal growth. The human element of education is at the core of this book, focusing on what we can do and achieve together: students, academic staff, higher education institutions and relevant stakeholders. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.




Social Theory and the Politics of Higher Education


Book Description

Social Theory and the Politics of Higher Education brings together an international group of scholars who shine a theoretical light on the politics of academic life and higher education. The book covers three key areas: 1) Institutional governance, with a specific focus on issues such as measurement, surveillance, accountability, regulation, performance and institutional reputation. 2) Academic work, covering areas such as the changing nature of academic labour, neoliberalism and academic identity, and the role of gender and gender studies in university life. 3) Student experience, which includes case studies of student politics and protest, the impact of graduate debt and changing student identities. The editors and chapter authors explore these topics through a theoretical lens, using the ideas of Michel Foucault, Niklas Luhmann, Barbara Adams, Donna Massey, Margaret Archer, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Hartmut Rosa, Norbert Elias and Donna Haraway, among others. The case studies, from Africa, Europe, Australia and South America, draw on a wide range of research approaches, and each chapter includes a set of critical reflections on how social theory and research methodology can work in tandem.




Reimagining the Higher Education Student


Book Description

Drawing on the perspectives of scholars and researchers from around the world, this book challenges dominant constructions of higher education students. Given the increasing number and diversity of such students, the book offers a timely discussion of the implicit and sometimes subtle ways that they are characterised or defined. Topics vary from the ways that curriculum designers ‘imagine’ learners, the complex and evolving nature of student identity work, through to newspaper and TV representations of university attendees. Reimagining the Higher Education Student seeks to question the accepted or unquestioned nature of ‘being a student’ and instead foreground the contradictions and ‘messiness’ of such ideation. Offering timely insights into the nature of the student experience and providing an understanding of what students may desire from their Higher Education participation, this book covers a range of issues, including: Impressions versus the reality of being a Higher Education student Portrayals of students in various media including newspapers, TV shows and online Generational perspectives on students, and students as family members It is a valuable resource for academics and students both researching and working in higher education, especially those with a focus on identities, their importance and their constructions.




Changing the Subject


Book Description

Changing the Subject is a classic critique of traditional psychology in which the foundations of critical and feminist psychology are laid down. Pioneering and foundational, it is still the groundbreaking text crucial to furthering the new psychology in both teaching and research. Now reissued with a new foreword describing the changes which have taken place over the last few years, Changing the Subject will continue to have a significant impact on thinking about psychology and social theory.




Critical Approaches to the Study of Higher Education


Book Description

An essential guide to incorporating critical research into higher education scholarship. Winner of the Outstanding Publication Award of the Post-secondary Education Division of the American Educational Research Association Critical theory has much to teach us about higher education. By linking critical models, methods, and research tools with an advocacy-driven vision of the central challenges facing postsecondary researchers and staff, Critical Approaches to the Study of Higher Education makes a significant—and long overdue—contribution to the development of the field. The contributors argue that, far from being overly abstract, critical tools and methods are central to contemporary scholarship and can have practical policy implications when brought to the study of higher education. They argue that critical research design and critical theories help scholars see beyond the normative models and frameworks that have long limited our understanding of students, faculty, institutions, the organization and governance of higher education, and the policies that shape the postsecondary arena. A rigorous and invaluable guide for researchers seeking innovative approaches to higher education and the morass of traditionally functionalist, rational, and neoliberal thinking that mars the field, this book is also essential for instructors who wish to incorporate the lessons of critical scholarship into their course development, curriculum, and pedagogy.